Byzantium or Constantinople revisited

I came across this reconstruction of the city of Constantinople or Byzantium, later Istanbul,  in 1200 AD via Vivid Maps. I hadn't seen this site before, but it is worth a browse because it does contain some interesting maps. The original map comes from the Byzantium1200 website. The Byzantium 1200  project aims to create computer reconstructions of the Byzantine Monuments located in Istanbul as of the year 1200 AD. This, too, is worth a browse.

By 1200, Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire) was reduced in size, but it remained the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, a position it had occupied since the mid fifth century. The city was protected by massive walls that remained unbreached for 900 years before the city was taken in 1204 by the Crusader armies of the Fourth Crusade.

Looking back at past posts, the following is a somewhat random selection linked in some way to the city or the Byzantine Empire:

• March 1, 2008 Saturday Morning Musings - Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian
• December 18, 2008 Byzantium, Turtledove and the power of imagination in history
• December 20, 2008 Saturday Morning Musings - Byzantium, ARIA and Australian public policy
• December 29, 2008 Cultural change and indigenous Australia
• January 21,  2009 Byzantium finished
• January 22, 2009 Byzantium, agriculture and the movement of peoples
• October 29, 2010  Rethymno and the complicated history of Crete 

Saturday Morning Musings - the dark side of the Belle Époque

I have always liked Aubrey Beardsley's art work. This is a 1893 piece, The Climax, based on the story of Salome and John the Baptist. My liking dates from a particular period in my life that has become enshrouded in a certain nostalgia, if with an equal recognition of  just how young we all were!

I mention this now because of a very interesting BBC article by Fisun Güner, The dark side of the Belle Époque. The Belle Époque period of Western European history is usually dated from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the start of World War. The period was named in retrospect, a golden age highlighted by and ended by the slaughter in the trenches.

While it was a golden age, Güner draws out its darker side characterised by some of the art of Fin de siècle, a French term that means the end of the century. There was a feeling of decadence, of despair, of things not right.  For some, things had to be torn down to be rebuilt,.for others, social order had to be preserved. For most, there was the excitement of the new, of progress. All this took place against a background of social Darwinism whose deep poison was working its way through intellectual and political life.

I leave you to read Güner's piece. I hope that you find it interesting.  

Saturday Morning Musings - snakes, terrorists and the future of Poland

For some reason, I had always thought the phrase "snake in the grass" to be Australian. Apparently not. According to Dictionary.com, this metaphor for treachery, alluding to a poisonous snake concealed in tall grass, was used in 37 b.c. by the Roman poet Virgil ( latet anguis in herba). It was first recorded in English in 1696 as the title of a book by Charles Leslie.

This snake was photographed at Metz east of Armidale by Gordon Smith. Gordon thought that it was probably an eastern brown snake. Reputedly the second most venomous snake in the world, these are truly big snakes with an average size of 1.1–1.8 m (3.6–5.9 ft). The maximum recorded size for the species is 2.4 m (7.9 ft)!

It has been a little while since I mentioned Gordon's blog. Subtitled a pictorial journal of life in rural Australia, lookANDsee is a rather wonderful photo blog. If you haven't visited or haven't visited for a while, you should have a browse.

I don't like brown snakes. They frighten me. We had gone out for lunch with some friends of my parents on a property to the east of Armidale. Bored, I decided to go for a walk after lunch. It was a hot, still day. As I walked though the paddock  near  the house, a large brown snake crossed the path in front of me. They really are big. I fear in this case I chose boredom over adventure and returned to the house!

Staying with the snake in the grass theme, detailed forensic investigations are slowly knitting together the details of the Brussels attacks, including the apparent links with the earlier Paris attacks. It seems clear that this was a significant group, attacks some time in the planning.

Thinking of these attacks in military terms, I think that it is helpful to remember that this type of weapon takes time to assemble and once used cannot be used again. As we saw in Bali in 2002, the logistics involved are quite significant.The first Bali bombing was followed in 2004 by the Australian embassy attack in Jakarta and then in 2005 the second Bali bombings. However, the attacks and subsequent police follow up seem, touch wood, to have blunted the capacity to carry out further attacks. I am not saying that they won't occur, but the cells involved had been some time forming  so repetition becomes more difficult each time the weapon is used.

Meantime, the repercussions drag on. In a post, Who is right?, AC reflects rather sadly on the recent political changes in Poland. To my mind, there is a nasty bigoted streak in the Polish governing Law and Justice Party, the use of rhetoric intended to divide, the focus on perceived threats.

Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło has announced that Poland will not be able to take in asylum seekers from the EU for now following the terrorist attacks in Brussels. The stated position is part of an anti-immigration rhetoric that has been running for some time now.  The Irish Times reports that the Polish shift on migration is in line with public opinion in the country: 64 per cent of Poles want their national borders closed to asylum seekers, according to a poll by the Adam Smith think tank. This type of attitude is widely held across Eastern Europe.

Many Australians and especially on the right would agree with the stated Polish position. Nevertheless, the attitude of the Law and Justice Party that the EU is there to benefit Poland, not Poland to benefit the EU is (as phrased) unsustainable. .During the twentieth century, Europe's conflicts imposed the two bloodiest wars in human history on the world. During the Second World War, an estimated 5.7 million Poles lost their life as a consequence of the German occupation. This was followed by the Soviet occupation.

Ethnicity lay at the heart of the Second World War and its associated horrors, political ideology at the base of the Soviet Occupation, state totalitarianism was common to both. The Poles themselves were not totally innocent victims.

Poland cannot have it both ways, to have its cake and eat it too.  One of the drivers in the formation of the EU was the desire to avoid another European conflict, to resolve the ethnic tensions that had divided the continent. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Yugoslav wars showed the continuing power of ethnicity, of old wounds.The language used by the right wing parties and by Eastern European leaders suggests that the lessons have still not been learned.

Two million Poles now live in Germany and the UK. The Polish economy is deeply entwined within the European economy. Poland depends upon European institutions for its very survival. The resurgence of Russia, the memory of a past in which Poland was a victim of external forces and its geographic position, makes many Poles deeply fearful.

There is, I think, a view in Poland that the Atlantic alliance and especially the US provides a shield. That of itself a rather fragile defence. The alliance is deeply linked to NATO and to the European institutions. It's actually very difficult to see the US as such becoming involved in or threatening a war to protect Poland. The Ukraine revealed the limitations of alliance power.

Both the US and the EU have been guilty of external political and diplomatic overreach. Georgia demonstrated that, as did the Ukraine. Brussels itself has been guilty of internal overreach as well..Institution building takes time. Australia has been a Federation for over 100 years and divisions remain. Like Canberra or for that matter Sydney, Brussels seems to believe in standardisation for the sake of standardisation. In doing so, in also pushing EU expansion so hard,the EU has created its own problems.

All that said, the EU needs too, and I think will, muddle through.Certainly the rise of nationalism, a nationalism based on ethnicity and riven by the divisions of the past, complicates matters. The EU is the only barrier against the re-fragmentation of Europe.

For Poland's part, EU membership is just too important in a practical sense for Poland to withdraw or to threaten EU survival. Should push come to shove, and barring an attack of political madness, the Law and Justice Party and the present Polish Government have just too much at stake including the survival of Poland itself. They may posture, and posturing is important and can push people in strange and extreme directions, but their freedom to move on critical issues is limited so long as Poland remains a member of the EU.

Finally, in considering the European political scene and others as well including Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in the US,  it pays to distinguish between particular manifestations and the underlying causes.

Law and Justice views on abortion, homosexuality and gender roles may be conservative to the point that a woman, for example, cannot get an abortion even if the law allows it. The more extreme manifestations of those views should be challenged, but it should also be recognised that there is a strong thread of social conservatism in Poland such that many feel threatened at the pace of social change. The Soviet occupation and the communist system suppressed  elements of those views, but they remained.

In economic terms, at least by European standards, Poland has done well in recent years. However, growth has been poorly distributed. In some parts of the country, living standards are the lowest in Europe, lower than in Soviet times. This is reflected in the shift within Law and Justice from something approaching a neo-conservative economic policy towards a left wing populist state intervention policy, designed to appeal to disadvantaged people and areas.
    
Then we have the law and order mantra. This appeals to those who feel threatened and who wish stability and certainty. This also appeals to the authoritarian tendency that appears to exist in Polish history and especially in the inter-war period.

The geographic divides in Polish politics are stark. I do not pretend to properly understand all the elements, but it seems clear enough. A political map shows a country divided. In the west and north the Civic Platform Party dominates. This is the area that seems to have benefited most from growth and is more cosmopolitan. Law and Justice dominates in the more socially conservatively ane economically more depressed east The map shows the votes in the 2010 presidential election,

Sitting in Australia and prognosticating on events in Europe and especially countries such as Poland that I have never visited is, of course, a dangerous occupation. Nevertheless, my view remains that the EU will muddle through, that this is just another part of the process of creating a new political entity. Given this and my assessment of Poland, I think that Poland will stay in the EU and that, consequently, Law and Justice will find its wings clipped on some key issues.

The alternatives are, I fear. too dreadful to comfortably contemplate. One is the break-up of the EU. A second is an EU controlled by the forces of the nationalistic right. A third is Poland's exit and its entry into a grey zone, a marchland between Europe and an expanding Russian sphere of influence.

  .

Monday Forum - the battle for Europe's soul

Today's Monday Forum is a meander. I leave it in your hands to decide which direction to go, including revisiting issues from past Monday Forums.

Last Thursday, eldest left the warmth of Sydney for Copenhagen, returning to this weather!  While in Copenhagen last year, I asked what cyclists did in winter? The answer was ride! Apparently, it's quicker than public transport. Mmmm. I might trade warmth for speed in this case.

In Saturday Morning Musings - the 2016 global outlook  (2 January 2016) I said in part:

Doubts about the future of the EU has been a common theme in the reporting and commentary on the various European crises of 2015, with sometimes gleeful predictions of a break-up of the EU. I would be very surprised if that happened. As I have explained in previous posts, the model that I have used to understand some EU dynamics is the Federal model for the EU is an evolving Federation; the term Union is a misnomer. Applying this model, I expect Europe to muddle through through with some strengthening of central power. 

At the time I was writing, news of the New Year events in Cologne was just breaking. Now the number of alleged cases has topped 500, fueling anti-immigration protests in Germany.The photo is from the linked BBC news story.

The events in Cologne are unacceptable. If it were to happen in Sydney or Melbourne on New Year's Eve, there would be a massive political explosion. However, the tone of the protests makes me very uncomfortable indeed.

Growing up, I knew of the mass forced people movements at the end of World War II, I was less aware of people movements within Europe during the War associated with the desire to create Lebensraum or living space for the German people. Yes, I knew the phrase, but not the full implications.

I was reminded of all this while watching a document series "Invasion outbreak of World War 2" which focuses on Poland. Let me just give you a simple number. Following the German/Soviet Union agreement to partition Poland and the German invasion, large sections of Poland were incorporated into Germany. Around 1.5 million Poles were forcibly relocated to the so-called General Government territory so that their homes could be occupied by German settlers. Following the war, the process went into reverse, as millions of ethic Germans were relocated including those who had called Poland home many, many generations. This was ethnic cleansing on a large scale, a process that we had seen earlier with the mass forced relocations in Greece and Turkey at the end of the First World War and would see later on a smaller scale in the Balkans.

The European experiment was meant to overcome this bitter past, but the past hangs on. In Poland, for example, the Law and Justice Party still reflects old battles.You can find similar patterns in other countries. I remain of the view that Europe will muddle through 2016, ending with some strengthening of central powers. It is less clear what will happen to Europe's soul.

Perhaps I'm wrong. What do you think?

Postscript

More information is emerging about the Cologne incident. According to BBC News reports, North Rhine-Westphalia state's interior minister Ralf Jaeger has criticised

" police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events. 

His report details how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered on 31 December. Smaller groups formed, surrounding women, then threatening and attacking them, he said. 

These groups were predominately made up of North African men who had travelled to Cologne from different cities. 

"After the intoxication with drugs and alcohol came violence," said Mr Jaeger. "It culminated in the acting out of fantasies of sexual omnipotence. That must be severely punished."

Certain things in the emerging information make me quite uncomfortable. Just to summarise the reasons for my discomfort.

There are a number of different issues involved that to some degree are being conflated in reporting.

To suggest, as some European leaders appear to have, that women should avoid certain times or certain areas for safety reasons creates discomfort.

Leaving gender issues aside, it has always been the case that wisdom sometimes dictates caution. To use a Sydney example, I used to stay in Kings Cross when visiting Sydney because I loved the ambiance of the area including its restaurants. However, I did exercise some care, especially late at night because there were some risks to physical safety. In similar vein, there were some areas in Sydney near Newtown where walking alone at night could pose significant risks as one friend found when he was king-hit and robbed..

All that said, the idea that that women should be told to avoid areas or behaviour in Europeans cities for risk of sexual attack is discomforting. This is certainly so if applied to Cologne's main railway station on New Year's Eve.

Equally discomforting is the idea of an alcohol or drug fueled male sex mob. I had not heard of taharrush gameâ, an Arabic word apparently meaning group sexual harassment in crowds, although I do remember the incidents in Cairo's Tahrir Square at the time of the Egyptian revolution. To the degree that this pathology exists, it needs to be dealt with and firmly.

Perspective is important, however. Even at a thousand, the numbers involved in Cologne were not large. There was clearly a significant policing failure. This brings me to my next area of discomfort.

Official reporting on this incident and apparently others in Europe appears to involve a degree of self-censorship, an unwillingness to record ethnicity or the culture of sub-groups even where this is directly connected with the incident in question. Again, we have seen this in Australia.

The reason for this appears to be partly a matter of political correctness, more a fear of exacerbating tension.

To my mind, it's a silly approach. Details of an incident and public responses to an incident are two very separate things and need to be dealt with separately. People generally know who is involved. If police or official media outlets don't report or massage their reports by concealing information, then it just provides ammunition to those who wish to use the incidents for their own purposes and just fuels the fears of those already frightened or angry. It's generally best to report accurately and fully, dealing with the consequences as a second issue.

Postscript 2

In comments, Ramana pointed me to this Huffington Post story (Mass Sexual Assaults in Germany and the Liberal Dilemma) which he agreed with. I also agree. Regardless of your position, there is always a dilemma in saying things that might provide ammunition to those who disagree with you on other matters that you consider to be important. He also pointed to this story on taharrush

kvd referenced this story as interesting but without comment on the content: The West is losing the battle for the heart of Europe.

Hygge, ethnocentricity and war - Musings on the European experience 1

On my first morning in Copenhagen, I left the flat early in the morning just to wander. I wanted to familiarise myself with the immediate area. By accident, I ended up in the Christiansborg Slot precinct. I will describe my full reactions later. For the moment, I want to focus on one things I found, a public art photographic exhibition.

Studying the exhibition in the early morning light, I found that it was an expression of what in Australia would be called progressive views. The first section focused on refugees, the second on families, families of all types and compositions - single. merged, gay couples, a whole pot pouri of relationships.

In the period leading up to my departure, the Australian and European media had been full of the growing European refugee crisis. For that reason, I was very interested in the display. I apologise for the standard of the photos.

The introduction to the refugee component is set out below. You can see the focus on refugees and conflict, on the local experience. You can also sense underlying tensions in the use of first names for the sake of "their own and their families safety."  

By comparison with Sweden, the number of refugees in Denmark appears relatively small both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the Danish population. On the streets of Copenhagen or on public transport, the proportion of those visibly different whether by ethnicity or dress is very small compared to say Sydney.

Australians forget or don't  always realise just how diverse Australia has become especially in the big cities compared to many other parts of the world. In Denmark, difference stands out.

While the values coming from Denmark's Lutheran heritage continue, modern Denmark is a very secular society, more so than Australia measured by the proportion of the population professing religious faith or engaged in religious activities. In these circumstances, it is the evolving values of the secular society that provide the dominating glue that holds the society together.

I discussed hygge in Introducing the Danish concept of hygge. As an Australian and especially one from a country background, I found aspects of hygge instantly familiar. The Australian equivalent is mateship. Like hygee, mateship is a secular phenomenon. Like hygge, mateship can be interpreted in various ways. Like hygge, mateship is incorporated in national dialogue and affects behaviour in different ways.

While hygge and mateship have significant differences, both have a common origin in the need for people to combine in the face of adversity. Hygge with its emphasis on coziness, harmony and cooperation can provide a vehicle for integration, for admission. Indeed, I saw aspects of this on the streets of Copenhagen. However, it can also be a vehicle for exclusion, for a restatement of them and us.

Denmark has experienced war in a way Australia has not. This is true for all European countries. It affects attitudes. This quote from the German Lutheran theologian Martin Niemöller was included in the display.

The Second World War was all about ethnicity. Yes, other elements were present, but ethnicity was central. In saying this, we generally focus on the treatment of the Jews and Gypsies, but this was a result of a deeper ethnic divide.

The concept of lebensraum was central to the Second World War in Europe. Lebensraum involved a desire to bring together a scattered people considered to be superior, the Germans, and give them an expanded homeland. More than 50 million people died as a result, many millions more were forced to relocate during and after the War, The scars exist to today.

The political battles now going on in Europe represent a conflict between those who want to re-assert national or ethnic identity and those who seek a broader vision. There is actually nothing wrong in wishing to preserve identity, although many on the left would deny this. However, it becomes very problematic indeed when the desire to preserve identity becomes wrapped in language that asserts superiority, the special value of difference.  .

I will continue this muse in my next post, looking at further aspects of the European experience.

Saturday Morning Musings - Armidale soap maker George Mallaby and the Great Paris Exhibition of 1900

I have been enjoying my buckets series, but have put it aside today for another topic.

Next week's Armidale Express History Revisited column is on the Armidale soap maker George Mallaby. By happenstance, Mallaby visited the 1900 Great Exhibition in Paris where he also seems to have won a gold medal for his soap. The image shows the Exhibition site.

This Exhibition was quite something. Visited by nearly 50 million people, it was a celebration of industry, science and art, with the majority of pavilions built in the Art Nouveau style.

How the Paris World's Fair brought Art Nouveau to the Masses in 1900 from io9 contains some rather good images of the Exhibition. There is also a link in the story to other European Art Nouveau buildings. Have a browse. It's quite fun.

This was, it seems, the last of the great world fairs, at least for a period. Despite the huge crowds, It was a financial disaster, costing all those involved dearly. It was just so grand. This photo is of the Russian pavilion.

Equally importantly, the Great War would soon tear the whole structure down. I suppose that we can think of it as hubris, a belief in progress and power. The US was challenging, but the European empires were at their peak.  

I have always liked this period because of the optimism and belief in progress, the joy of new discoveries. 

The Australian art historian Robert Hughes coined the phrase The Shock of the New largely to describe the period. 

The Great War did not just destroy the dynasties, it cast a darkening shadow over the human spirit. 

In all this, I wonder what George Mallaby thought of the Exhibition? He and his wife, both working in mill, married young and left for Australia soon after. By 1900, Mallaby had established a substantial business in Armidale with considerable real estate holdings providing comfort and security for his wife and now seven children. The Mallabies were Methodists, strictly observing the Sabbath and suspicious of ostentation. 

There is a big gap between Armidale of the 1890s, between the rhythms of local industry and church and family life, and Europe's gilded age. I am sure that he found it interesting, but George was probably a pragmatic man. Having won his medal, marketing was always important, he moved on to the more important business of visiting  his old home in Yorkshire. His parents had died, and he wanted to pay for their funeral plot.        

The rise of the European trading company – imperial creation in the pursuit of profits

This post is a signpost, a post intended for later use. It’s creation was triggered by my reading of Emily Hahn’s Raffles of Singapore with its detailed descriptions of aspects of the operations of the British East India Company.

I had obviously been aware of the operations of the various trading companies such as the English later British East India Company (established 1600), the Dutch East India Company (1602) or the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670). There has always been a degree of romance and a sense of adventure associated with such companies,  one captured rather nicely by the original title of the Hudson’s Bay Company: The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay. How could one not be attracted by a title like that?

While I was aware of the companies, I don’t think that I was properly aware of just how early they began, how big some of them were, nor of the critical role they played in gathering capital, organising trade and laying the basis for the outward expansion of Western Europe.

The illustration shows the shipyards of the Dutch East India Company in 1726.

To get a feel for what I mean, and assuming that you have some spare time (do any of us today?!), this Wikipedia page lists some of the trading companies.

Take an hour some time and just click through on the links. You will quickly get a feel for just what I’m talking about.    

Saturday Morning Musings – the complexities of recent European history with more than a dash of Poland including Once My Mother

Australian PM and Foreign Affairs Minister Bishop have a highly developed sense of moral outrage. It comes, I think, from the desire to play to a domestic audience in circumstances where the external impact of their remarks beyond the nation’s borders has been relatively low. This attitude is not unique to them. It infected previous PM’s and the Australian media as well.

I make this point now because of MH17. Here I did  as I often do, spending some time to check press reporting in other countries. Noticeably, the official responses in other countries outside the US has been far more tempered. This includes the Dutch who, after all, have suffered the greatest loss of life and also the Malaysians whose PM lost a relative on the plane. .

I don’t know that I am very comfortable with a situation where Australia appears to be leading the global sense of international outrage. It’s not a universal sense of outrage, other stories such as Gaza are more important in some areas, but is certainly so among many countries who have been affected or where people travel. We can be as outraged as we like, but in the end it takes cool heads not domestic posturing to get results.

Mind you, my use of the words “domestic posturing” may be unfair. If my own emotional reactions are any guide, I am sure that that the PM feels very strongly. And yet, neither he nor Ms Bishop can actually afford to let emotions within a 24 hours news cycle set the Australian response.

Frankly, I find the Russian response to the whole thing unbelievable. But cold, forensic analysis is required now if we are to have any chance of getting to the truth. 

Last year I watched Remembrance, a film partly set in Poland. The film is based on the true story of      Jerzy Bielecki  and Cyla Cybulska. Jerzy was a Polish political prisoner sent to Auschwitz, Cyla a Polish Jew at the same camp. They met, fell in love, escaped, but were later separated.  Told that the other had died, they went their separate ways only to meet many years later.

The film changes key elements of the story, but provides a gripping picture of a part of Polish history. I mention this now in part because events in Ukraine reflect the historic past of that part of Europe, more because of the imminent release  of  Sophia Turkiewicz’s new documentary film, Once My Mother, another film with Polish connections.

The term New Australians has been largely forgotten now, almost discredited. It was, in fact, a public relations coup. How do you persuade an insular society still reeling from the Second World War, worried about its future and cautious of change, that  it must admit millions of new residents including refugees from countries that had recently been enemies? You make them one of us.

Assimilation is another now discredited term. However, it was also part of the necessary dialectic. These New Australians will assimilate and become one with us.

Many modern Australians have, I think, lost sight of the tragedy and complexity of European history over the first half of the twentieth century. I make this as a general comment, for at the same time many of the children and grandchildren of that first post war immigration wave are now (like Andrew Denton) seeking details of that past connection to illuminate their own life. In Andrew’s case, the story took him in part to Poland and the holocaust.  

The story of Sophia and her mother Helen is a little different, but also part of the chaos of the time.

Sophia Turkiewicz is best known in Australia for her 1984 film Silver City focused on the story a shipload of Polish refugees coming to Australia. I haven’t seen the film. I must do so now.

Sophia’s relationship with her mother was complicated, in part because Helen placed her in an orphanage for two years. Sophia never properly understood why. She decided to do her mother’s story as a student film project, collected some material and undertook some filming, but the put the matter aside. Now, with her mother sliding into dementia,she took the project up again before it was too late. In doing so, she found a little of her mother’s remarkable story, including the reasons why Helen had put her aside for a period.

The story is complex, but its start can be summarised in this way.

Following the German-Russian pact and the subsequent invasion and partition of Poland, up to 1.5 million Poles were deported from Soviet occupied Poland to Siberia. Conditions were very poor; tens of thousands died. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the exiled Polish Government and Stalin reached a peace agreement. As part of this, an “amnesty” was granted to many Polish detainees who were to be allowed to join a new Polish army to be formed under the command of General Władysław Anders. The new army was to be under the control of the exiled Polish Government.

Tens of thousands of Poles including many civilians were released from the Gulags but without food or transport to find their way to the new force. Again, thousands died trekking to the new headquarters. Sophia’s mother was one of those who had been exiled and then found their way to the Polish Army headquarters.

There were inevitable tensions between the Soviet authorities and what was, in effect, a foreign army on Soviet soil. Anders therefore decided to move his his newly formed force and the civilians who had joined them to Persia where they would come under British control. Again, there was limited transport so that people had to trek to to the Persian border. Again, thousands died.

  Helen accompanied the movement to Persia. Then when the troops went on, she was relocated to a refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia where she was to sty for the next six years.

For the first time in her life, Helen had now found now found security and peace.  She also found love in the person of an Italian POW held in an adjoining POW  camp. Sophia was born.

With the end of the war, the Italian POWs are repatriated, leaving Helen alone again. Finally, as a single mother, she arrives by boat in Australia with her baby daughter. She speaks no English, has had no formal education and knows nobody. She puts Sophia in an orphanage. This is where the story begins. I gave the link to the film above, but just repeating it. It includes the trailer and background material.

The Mediterranean's 300 year drought

This piece by Kosta Pandos and Sunanda Creagh in The Conversation, Climate change hastened ancient civilisations' collapse: study, interested me. It reports on a new study that concluded that climate change sparked the political and economic turmoil that hastened the collapse of formerly prosperous civilisations in regions such as Greece and Syria towards the end of the 13th century BC. You can find the full study here.

The Conversation writers put it in the context of current discussions on global warming, although the study does no more than illustrate the importance of climatic shifts in a particular place and time in which I have an interest.

I commented once before that one of the things that I did not properly understand when I first did history and prehistory at University was the extent of climatic variation. If you look at just how dry the Greek Islands are today, you can see how a long drought might affect life. In similar vein, we now know that the troubles afflicting new settlement at Sydney were in part climate induced, while during the long Aboriginal occupation of this country there were multiple climatic variations.

The expansion in our knowledge of past variations in climate and their affects is really quite remarkable. 

Unravelling the secret history of the plague

The Black Death, bubonic plague, reportedly reached the trading city of Caffa in the Crimea in 1347 from its original base in China. There as part of a protected siege the Mongol army under Jani Beg, itself suffering from the disease, catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls to infect the inhabitants. From there as well as other places, the disease spread throughout Europe.

This was not the first outbreak of bubonic plague.

The Plague of Justinian in the 6th and 7th centuries was the first known attack on record. From historical descriptions, as much as 40 percent of the population of Constantinople died from the plague. According to Wikipedia, modern estimates suggest half of Europe's population was wiped out before the plague disappeared in the 700s. The damage done to the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire was profound and long lasting.

The second major outbreak that began in the late 1340s was just as devastating. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60 percent of Europe's population, reducing the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400.

This illustration of the Black Death is from the Toggenburg Bible (1411).

The effects of the Black Death were profound, etching itself into the culture and psyche of Europe. You get something of a feeling for the fear from the panicked reaction in Sydney to the 1900 outbreak of plague. These photos from NSW State Records provide a visual picture of the response.  

The disease itself is enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, Northern India and Uganda. yet despite this, and despite later epidemics including the 1890 Chinese pandemic, the virulence of the plague seemed to decline compared to the devastation of the Black Death.

Now, in a remarkable piece of scientific investigation, a scientific team has been able to reconstruct the DNA of the actual plague that devastated Europe and other places in the fourteenth century. You will find the McMaster University press release here, the Nature article reporting the results here, a Nature video here, and the transcript of an interview with one of the team here.

Now the striking thing about the results is that they suggest that the Black Death was actually very similar, perhaps identical, to the current variant of the disease. How, then, do we explain its previous virulence?

Pandemics are generally multi-factorial, drawing their virulence from a combination of causes.

The long period between the Black Death and the plague of Justinian means that there was probably very little natural immunity to the disease. The combination of population increase with climate change, what has been called the little ice age, meant reduced food supplies, higher malnutrition, making people more vulnerable to disease. Poor hygiene and crowded conditions created an environment that allowed the disease to spread.

The third plague pandemic that began in China in 1855 and then spread around the world (the Sydney outbreak was part of this pandemic) affected India especially badly, with an estimated 12.5 million deaths. Again, you have concentrated population. According to the Wikipedia article, the strenuous efforts by the British authorities to control the Indian plague created strong local opposition and became a feature in growing Indian nationalism.

On 22 June 1897, the Chapekar brothers, young Pune brahmins, shot and killed W. C. Rand, an Indian Civil Services officer acting as Pune Special Plague Committee chairman, and his military escort, Lt. Ayerst. The government also found the nationalist press guilty of incitement. Independence activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak was charged with sedition for his writings as editor of the Kesari newspaper and was sentenced to eighteen months rigorous imprisonment. He became a living martyr to the struggle for Indian independence.

  Can the plague come back? Perhaps not, but it does illustrate the way in which disease can play havoc with human endeavour.    

Rhodes and the sad failure of the Dodecanese campaign

Greek Trip, Day 16, Sunday 3 October 2010, Rhodes

Continuing our trip story from A visit to the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes, Sunday 3 October dawned bright and warm. We gathered on the roof garden breakfast area to plan our day.

According to the hotel, San Nikolis', the main hotel buildings date from 1300AD. There is a minor date problem here that I haven't had time to resolve, because this is a little before the final surrender of the Island to the Knights. 

The hotel buildings were constructed on part of the remains of the 2,000 year old agora of Ancient Rhodes. You will find agora in all the older Greek settlements. They were centres for public gatherings that also became markets. Apparently, the Greek words for I shop and I speak in public are both derived from agora, as is the English word agoraphobia. The Roman equivalent is forum.

We liked this hotel because it was comfortable if a bit kitsch, combining in a strangely satisfying way the  combination that is modern Greece.

The hotel bills itself as honeymoon/wedding location. The decorations were an eclectic mix of modern, mediaeval and classical.

From the roof garden, you looked over the preserved excavated remains of the agora to the wall built by the Knights. In another direction, the view was of the harbour with it's cruise ships.

"We don't like the cruise ships", our hostess explained. "Their passengers crowd the streets but don't spend any money. They interfere with our visitors."

Our host had played roles in many films made in Rhodes. The Island's varied history and built infrastructure provides filmic base from the early period to the Second World War.

One of the best know films filmed largely on Rhodes was the 1961 military epic, The Guns of Navarone. I enjoyed both the original book and the film. 

The events in the film are based around the events of the 1943  Dodecanese campaign.

With the defeat of the Germans in Africa in the spring of 1943, Winston Churchill turned his attention to the Dodecanese Islands, then Italian Territory. To his mind, their occupation would place pressure on neutral Turkey to join the Allies while opening up a new supply route to Russia.

British planning for what was called "Operation Accolade" began on 27 January 1943.  The Americans, who wanted to concentrate on a landing on Sicily and who where suspicious of British post war plans, told Churchill that they would not support the plan.

One of the things that I find interesting and that is little covered in the teaching of Australian history is the nature of the continuing conflict over a very long period between the US and Empire and Commonwealth strategic interests. I think that it's hard to cover simply because the perceptual models underlying research and teaching of Australian history reject the validity of the very idea of an Imperial and Commonwealth interest in the desire to pursue and present the ideal of the growth of Australian nationhood.

As the possibility of an Italian surrender became stronger, the British began planning for a more limited version of Operation Accolade. Again, the US said that it would not support it. Barely a week before the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, the military resources intended to support the scaled down version of Operation Accolade were dispersed.

With the Italian surrender, Italian forces in the Dodecanese wanted to surrender or join the Allies. There was a scrabble to try to help them. The far better organised Germans had not been blind to Allied plans. The result was the last great German victory of World War II, a humiliating defeat for the mainly British forces attempting to take the Dodecanese. The Islands remained under German control to the end of the war.

The biggest losers were the Jews of Rhodes. In my first post on Rhodes, Breakfast in Rhodes, I mentioned the Jewish Quarter in Rhodes old town. The ancient Jewish community had survived through multiple changes and by the 1920s represented a significant proportion of the population of the City of Rhodes. This seems then to have dropped, but there were still some 2,000 Jews in Rhodes in in 1943.   

The Italians had never fully shared the Nazi's preoccupation with the Jews. Now that the Germans had full control, German policy applied. On 19 July 1944, the Gestapo rounded up the island's Jewish inhabitants to send them to extermination camps. Few survived.    

Today, the guests of the San Nikolis' include a strong German contingent. The European ethnic wars of the twentieth century have been put aside, at least so far as major groups are concerned. German tourism is critical to Greece, German money to the preservation of Greece's past. I think that that's rather good, even if I do not like German breakfasts!

Well, breakfast is over. Now we have to get our car and head out. First stop one of Mussolini's pleasure palaces.          

Walking the walls of Rhodes

Greek Trip, Day 15, Saturday 2 October 2010, Rhodes continued

Continuing from Breakfast in Rhodes, after breakfast we moved off to find the entry to the walls, asking as we went. We still had no idea just what we were doing, although we could see signs of fortifications everywhere.

Now at this stage, I need to introduce a little bit of history.

In 1095 AD (or CE depending upon your preference), the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent envoys to Pope Urban II seeking aid against continuing invasion of the Seljuqs (Turks) who had penetrated not far from Constantinople (now Istanbul). The result was the First Crusade, whose primary aim came to be to free the Holy Lands from Muslim (Fatimid) rule.

The North African based Fatimids were in fact divided from and in opposition to the Seljugs on political, dynastic and religious grounds. During uneasy periods of peace and war, the Fatimids had progressively extended their territory at the expense of the Byzantines.  

In July 1099, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders who instead of returning the territory to Byzantine rule established a series of independent principalities, most importantly the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Now I need to introduce a new player. Australians will know them as the Knights of St John, Maltese as the Knights of Malta.

From 600 there had been a hospital in Jerusalem to care for Christian pilgrims. in 1005 Caliph Al Hakim destroyed the hospital and three thousand other buildings in the city. However, the hospital was given approval to re-open in 1023. After the Crusaders took the city, those involved with the care of pilgrims evolved into religious military orders, the Knights Hospitaller.

When the Kingdom of Jerusalem finally fell in 1291, the Knights took refuge in the Kingdom of Cyprus. from there, they decided to seek their own temporal domain, selecting Rhodes, then part of the Byzantine Empire. Still with me? I know that it's complicated, but that's the reality of Greek history.

After over two years of campaigning, the Island fell to the Knights 15 August 1309. Now named the Knights of Rhodes, they rebuilt the city into a model of the medieval ideal. The end result is that the world heritage listed old Rhodes is the largest still inhabited mediaeval centre in Europe.

I said earlier that Rhodes had a very different feel from the other Greek island centres that we had been too. This history is the reason why. If you look up this street, you will see the cobble stones, the medieval buildings.

This was a much tougher world. To hold their new territory, the Knights needed walls to hold of attack in an uncertain world. These were the walls we were going to walk along. Their size is simply unbelievable.   

I tried to find a photo that would give you a feel. This one gives at least a feel for scale. 

I said that the world was an uncertain place.

In 1444 and then again in 1480, the Knights withstood attack. However, in December 1522 Rhodes fell to the huge invading  army of Suleiman the Magnificent. The Knights had ruled Rhodes for 213 years, not much less than the time since Governor Phillip first arrived at Botany Bay in 1788. Rhodes would now be part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 400 hundred years.

The few remaining nights moved first to the Kingdom of Sicily and then to Malta where they set up a new base. The Knights, now known as the Knights of Malta, would rule in Malta until 1798 when Napoleon occupied the Island.  Today the Knights remain with several orders and internationally recognised vestigial powers as a quasi national entity. 

As we walked along the wall in the bright sun, we looked down into the old city on the left, the new city on the right.  Looking now for photos that might best encapsulate the feel, I chose this one from Clare looking down on the old city. It's not the best shot, but it captures some things I want to talk about. Comments follow the photo.

In terms of the modern, you have the jet trails in the sky, the solar hot water systems. Because of the climate, solar hot water systems are quite noticeable. They are everywhere. Then you have the Greek Orthodox dome and behind it to the right, the mosque. Rhodes is an interesting mix of history and cultures.

The following is another shot. Again, you can see the huddle of buildings and the solar hot water systems. In this case you can also see part of one of the internal gardens that are a feature of Rhodes.

We walked on through the sun to the end of the wall. Now to find our hotel, But that's for the next post!

Allies surrender in Greece

I did not record this, although I should have given my interest in things Greek. The daily diary of World war II, World War II Day-By-Day, records that on 28 April: 

Allied resistance on mainland Greece effectively ends at 5.30 AM when 8000 British, ANZAC, Greek and Yugoslav troops surrender at Kalamata, Peloponnese peninsula. The evacuation is over, although men will be collected from various small Greek islands over the next few days. Germans take 6508 British, 2030 Australian, 1614 New Zealand prisoners, plus 3806 Cypriots and Palestinians. Allied support of the British government commitments to Greece (executed mainly by NZ and Australian troops) has cost 2250 killed and wounded and 14,000 taken prisoner (out of 58,000 sent to Greece). In addition, 104 tanks, 192 field guns, 164 anti-tank guns, 40 anti-aircraft guns, 1812 machine guns, 8000 trucks are lost plus 209 aircraft destroyed (72 lost during the combat phase, 55 bombed on the ground by Luftwaffe, 82 destroyed or abandoned during the evacuation). Germany has overrun Greece in 23 days with 1318 killed and 3360 wounded (plus 166 killed and 392 wounded in Yugoslavia). In contrast, the Greco-Italian war in Northern Greece and Southern Albania (which was ended by the German invasion) costs Greece and Italy each about 14000 killed with 60,000 wounded. Most British troopships crowding Suda Bay, Crete, are sent on to Alexandria, Egypt, avoid attack by Luftwaffe bombers which sink 2 Greek steamers.

Rommel is still having trouble in Tobruk.

Persia, Greece & the Delian League

Greek Trip, Day 11, Tuesday 28 September 2010, Delos

This post continues the story of Delos from my last post, Introducing Delos.

Words are fractious things. They carry changing meanings that are often unseen. Take, as an example, the changing use of the words "near east", "middle east" and "far east".

All three are geographic descriptors, defining territory in terms of relative location to Europe. This type of geographically bound thinking is quite common, but it can also mislead. The current use of the term "middle east", for example, is quite new.

I mention this because understanding the next part of the story of Delos requires a shift in thought. Put aside, for a moment, all current geographic descriptors. Think, instead, of a stretch of territory from Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. This is imperial territory, home to empire after empire in unending succession over millennia. Boundaries and capital cities may have varied, but the boundaries of those empires always fluctuated between the Mediterranean to the Indus.

When I first studied ancient history, I could never understand why the short lived history of Alexander the Great and his empire should have had such a long influence. Geographic myopia, I fear. I thought of Alexander in Greek or European terms, moving from Macedonia into new and apparently unknown territory. In fact, he was asserting personal control over a vast territory already linked together in different ways by history.   

T he great river valleys were central to those various empires . They provided the irrigation based agricultural wealth, the peasant populations, that helped support the rulers, the aristocracy, the priests, the bureaucrats, the military.

The problem with empires is that, once built, they have to be maintained. All empires struggle with the dual problem of protecting their borders, while maintaining internal security in the face of sometimes fractious and often ethnically different subject peoples. All empires have also struggled over time with questions of succession of power.     

In 552 BC, the biggest powers in the geographic area that we are talking about were the Lydians in the west, the much bigger Median Empire in the east. The Lydians survive today in the phrase as rich as Croesus, a term derived from the fabled wealth of the last Lydian king.   

In 553 BC, the Persian prince Cyrus led a rebellion against the last Median king Astyages. While Persian, Cyrus was a grandson of Astyages and was supported by part of the Median aristocracy.  By 550 BC Cyrus had emerged victorious; the Persian or Achaemenid Empire replaced the Median kingdom.

As you can see from the  map, this was a seriously big Empire. You can also see how it covers the territory I have just been talking about.

To the Persians, the Greeks were something of a problem, a problem that would lead to major war.

In an earlier post, I spoke of the Dorians and Ionians as two of the major Greek tribes.

King Croesus had incorporated the Ionian cities of Asia Minor into Lydia. Sensing an opportunity in the troubles created by Cyrus's rebellion, Croesus invaded Media. The famous story goes that before doing so, he sought the advice of the oracle at Delphi on what is now the Greek mainland on the likelihood of success. The response was that if he did, a great empire would be destroyed. It was. Croesus lost, and Lydia was incorporated into the Persian Empire!

During the fighting, Cyrus asked the Ionian cities to join him. They refused. When, following his victory, they offered to submit on the same terms and conditions as had governed their relationships with Croesus, Cyrus refused. The Ionian cities were then forcibly incorporated into Persia. However, this left Cyrus with a problem. How should those cities be governed?

As I indicated earlier, these type of problems are common to all empires. The empire cannot survive for long if all authority has to be enforced by purely military means. A way has to be found of governing that extends beyond the purely military.

Lacking local elites or power structures, the Persians chose to install tyrants.

The idea of tyrants, local rulers wielding single power, had been popular among Greek city states as a way of overcoming the division created by factional fights within small communities. However, that idea had now been superceded by newer forms of governance. The tyrants appointed were unpopular. Worse, they drew Persia into the complicated world of Greek city states politics.

In 499 BC, Ionian city states revolted, a rebellion supported by city states outside Ionia. It took the Persians six years to crush the rebellion. Persian Emperor Darius decided to get rid of those pesky Greeks once and for all. The result  was warfare on a mass scale.

The following map shows the war theatre.  

      The war began with Persian successes. In 492, Darius's son-in-law invaded, forcing Thrace back into the empire, while making Macedon a client kingdom. 

The following year, Darius sent ambassadors to the Greek cities demanding submission. Many cities complied, but both Athens and Sparta responded by murdering the envoys. In 490, the Persians sent a major amphibious force to invade. The Athenians managed to defeat this at the battle of Marathon.

Darius was now determined to mount a full scale invasion. Preparations began, but were delayed by a major rebellion against Persian rule in Egypt. Darius died and was succeeded by his son Xerxes. Having crushed the Egyptian revolt, Xerxes prepared a huge military force.

The size of the Persian forces has been subject to debate. The suggestion in Herodotus of an army of 2.5 million seems to have been rejected by modern scholars. Even so, the consensus estimate of a force of 200,000 men drawn from across the Empire, a naval force of more than 1,000 ships, is a major invasion.

Planning appears to have been meticulous, with Persian engineers building a pontoon bride across the Hellespont to allow the huge force easier access. In 481, the army finally crossed into what is now Greece. In the end, and despite military successes on land, the Persians lost the war because they could not control the sea. As it had been before and would be later, naval power was critical.

In the last stages of the Greek city state forces turned to the offensive. This included the capture of the city that would become Byzantium, later Constantinople and now Istanbul.

Sparta now wished to withdraw from the war. The loose alliance of city states which had fought against the Persians had been dominated by Sparta and the Peloponnesian league. Now leadership shifted to Athens, the dominant naval power.

In 477 BC, a congress was called on Delos to institute a new alliance to continue the fight against the Persians. According to Thucydides, the official aim of the Delian League was to "avenge the wrongs they suffered by ravaging the territory of the king". This goal was divided into three main efforts; to prepare for future invasion; to seek revenge against Persia; and to organize a means of dividing spoils of war. Members could either offer armed forces or pay a tax to the joint treasury on Delos, with most opting for a tax.

  A new building program began on Delos. This photo shows the remains of the treasury.

We now enter a new phase in the turbulent world of Greek politics, for Athen's power and political ruthlessness turned the Delian League into an Athenian Empire. In turn, this lead to the Peloponnesian War.   

In symbolic terms, the transfer of the treasury from Delos to Athens in 454 BC marks the final transition point.

What had begun as a cooperative league among a reported 173 city states, was now subject to the needs of Athens and empire. Delos was now, once again, just a religious centre.        

Introducing Delos

Greek Trip, Day 11, Tuesday 28 September 2010, Delos

Delos: introducing Sparta vs Athens introduced the story of the Greek island of Delos. There I referred again to the influence Greece had exercised on Western thought, contrasting Athens and Sparta. I used a 1913 photo of dormitory at my old school to illustrate the concept of spartan.

By coincidence, I then found a copy of a 1923 magazine from that school. This led me to write 1923: Classical Greek in the New England countryside. The editorial sets out the views of a rather precocious schoolboy, William Charles Wentworth, on the continued importance of Classical Greece.

The vision of TAS (The Armidale School) as the Australian centre of Hellenic culture, a place where Australian boys wishing to go to an English university would study, may seem rather quaint now. However, it wasn't seen as unusual then for a TAS boy to go straight from Armidale to study at Oxford or Cambridge instead of Sydney University.

Wentworth himself went to Oxford, as had David Ogilvie a little earlier. Ogilvie was the father of Judith Wallace, the writer I referred to in Ogilvies, Wrights, social change. Reporting on a visit by Ogilvie to the school in 1925, The Armidalian commented that a number of boys that year were considering going to Oxford.

The financial impact of the Great Depression on the school and its pupils probably marked the end of the tradition. Then came war. By the 1950s, the tradition had become a memory. Greek was no longer taught, while those TAS boys going to university went to local establishments. Still, the influence lingered, a localised example of the continuing influence of Greece on thought.

No-one lives on Delos now beyond a few staff. The whole island is a world heritage site. Here, as at so many other Greek historical sites, EU money has played an important role in protection and restoration. Greece itself does not have the resources to properly manage its historical heritage without support.    

The ferries from Mykonos dock at the small commercial harbour. There is constant jockeying for position. We were there at the end of the tourist season. Even so, there were people everywhere.

Walking up from the wharf to the site entrance, the first impression is the sheer scale of the place. Ruins stretch to the right and left and then up the hill. It is simply hard to get a proper feel.

Guided tours are available, but there are also sign posted walks of various lengths. We chose the second. I am not sure that this was the best option. What I am sure of is that we didn't allow enough time. I also found that I didn't have enough historical knowledge to properly fit things together.

In Ancient Thera I described the overlapping history of that site on Santorini. Delos makes Ancient Thera look like a pussy cat! Millennia overlap in complicated ways. To my mind, the best way of handling this in the first instance is to look at the site as a working settlement, at the town as it was. Then factor in the history.

To illustrate, think of modern Sydney. This is a working city that has its own patterns determined by geography. Then, within this, you have various tourist sites - the Rocks for example - that form part of the city's history. If, and this is the way that the guidebooks and site signs generally work, you looked only at the sites in isolation from each other, then you just get a whole series of historical snapshots that don't really fit together.

Like Ancient Thera, Delos's greatest prosperity began in Hellenic times, the period after the death of Alexander the Great. It reached its greatest prosperity in late Hellenistic and Roman times, when it was declared a free port and became, it is claimed, the financial and trading centre of the Mediterranean. By 100 BC Delos had an estimated population of 30,000, which included foreigners from as far away as Rome, Syria, and Egypt. Each group built its own shrines and seem to have lived in relative harmony.

All this sounds nice, doesn't it? But Delos was also the greatest slave market in the Eastern Mediterranean, perhaps the greatest in the entire Roman Empire. Revenue from the sale of human bodies helped underpin that prosperity.

The main built environment dates from this long prosperous period. Within this, there are buildings and public places that date from earlier periods when Delos was a religious and political rather than commercial centre. There, frozen in time, are monuments to now vanished greatness. The photo shows the Lions of Naxos.

Naxos was once a considerable power in a regional context. Then it fell to the Athenians. Ruins here and at the religious centre of Delphi on the mainland are mementos to Naxos's once power.

Like so many other former centres on the Greek islands, Delos's prosperity depended on trade and that depended on peace. In 88 BC Mithridates, the king of Pontus, attacked the unfortified island as part of a revolt against Roman rule. The population now estimated at 20,000 was reportedly killed or sold into slavery, the sanctuary treasures were looted, and the city was razed to the ground.

The Romans partially rebuilt the city, but continous pirate raids made life difficult. In 66 BC the Romans built defensive walls around the city whose ruins remain. However, decline continued. In the 2nd century AD, Pausanius recorded that Delos was inhabited only by the temple guards.

Today's built remains reflect this turbulent history. Yet enough remains to get a feel for what life must have been like. 

In writing this post, I haven't quite got to the point I said I would, the conflict between Athens and Sparta and the role of Delos in that conflict.  This will have to wait until my next post. 

Delos: introducing Sparta vs Athens

Greek Trip, Day 11, Tuesday 28 September 2010, Delos

Continuing the story of our Greek trip from my last post, Santorini to Mykonos, Day 11 dawned hot. Today we were going to visit the ruins at Delos.

After breakfast, we walked down to the port to catch the ferry for the short trip. The cruise ships in town had followed us from Santorini.

The sheer size of tourism on the Greek Islands is mind-boggling by Australian standards. I have included this shot just because it shows part of the deck of our ferry, and this is only one of the ferries bring people to Delos. 

All groups reinvent history to suit their own needs. I have already spoken of the the way that the modern Greek state drew from history, sometimes with disastrous results. I have also spoken of the Western European love affair with things Greek. With Delos, we enter a new period in Greek history, one central to Greece's view of itself, as well as Western European perceptions of Greece. As we shall see, those perceptions had their murky elements.

The island of Delos is small, 3.43 square kilometres or one square mile. Like the other Greek Islands it is dry with almost no resources. Those living there had to import all their food. Yet this became one of the centres of the ancient world.     

The sheer scale of the ruins is daunting. I tried to find a photo that would properly show this. This one at least gives a hint.

I now need to introduce some new historical players that I have deliberately left aside to this point.

What is now called the classical period of Greek civilization covers a time spanning from the early 5th century BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. We call it the classical period because it came to be seen as the pinnacle of Greek civilisation. Its influence is with it today. 

I noted before that I found Greek history all very complicated at school. Keeping things very simple, the term Greek applies to people who spoke a broadly common language. That language was not uniform, but broken up into a series of dialects. The concept of what it was to be Greek or Hellenic varied over time and was affected by the politics of the time.

By tradition, the Classical Greeks thought of themselves in terms of four major tribes, the Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Acheans. Just as the very idea of Greek was a cultural rather than political construct, the tribes are best thought of as ethnic groups; the term ethnic meaning people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture comes from Greek. They were not political entities.

Common ethnicity does not necessarily make for harmony. The territory occupied by those who might be thought of as Greek was broken up into many small territorial entities, small in size and population. Sometimes brutal warfare was common, even among groups sharing common ancestry.

What I really hadn't got my mind around was just how small these territories were, nor how closely they pressed up against available resources. A few years ago I re-read Homer's the Odyssey for the first time since school. Then I had read it more as an adventure tale, now I was surprised at the material sparseness of life, at the apparently small things that triggered warfare; cattle, for example, were very important.

  This sparseness compares with the wealth of the earlier Minoan period and would change later.

I have included this photo from Clare because it actually captures the denseness of later urban life on Delos.

The Greeks were great colonisers. When drought or over-population threatened or sometimes just for wealth, settlers were sent out to found new colonies, new political entities. In turn, those colonies founded new ones. To my knowledge, Greek history is the first in which colonies and the processes of colonisation was identified as a specific historical theme.

During this change process, systems of government changed. Monarchical rule was replaced by oligarchies and tyrants and then by collective decision making systems; the concept of democracy emerged.

The tribes or Greek ethnic groups formed one element in this mix. Of the four traditional groups, the two most important were the Ionians and Dorians. I think of them as the sailors and land-lubbers, although that's not quite accurate.

The Ionians seem to have emerged first. Without going into the whole history, that's beyond me, they were a sea-faring group that occupied the islands and mainland areas adjoining the sea. Then came the Dorians. While they included sea-going cities, Corinth is an example, they were more a mainland people.

The two groups have become identified with the two city states that came to dominate, Sparta and Athens. Both exercised and exercise a powerful influence on European thought.

Sparta emerged as a military state whose focus was war, self-defence and sacrifice. Spartan, the idea of restraint and self control, of an ascetic life style avoiding luxuries, comes from Sparta.

This ideal of self-defence and sacrifice, exercised a profound influence on European thought, including the English boarding school systems.

This photo from my old school, a school then in very much the English tradition, shows a dormitory from 1913. I would certainly describe the conditions as spartan!

Love of things Spartan came to be called Laconophilia after Laconia, the area of Greece that included Sparta. This had various manifestations that included incorporation in the ideology of Nazi Germany. There the idea of self-sacrifice, of military virtues, of subjecting personal behaviours to the needs of the state, had an obvious appeal. But so did the idea of exclusion, of the preservation of ethnic purity.

Athens, by contrast, was far more individualistic and mercurial. Athens gave us the concept of democracy and some of the greatest thinkers the world has known. But it was also a blatantly opportunistic and imperialistic power in a way that Sparta could not be. Sparta wanted to preserve its status-quo, Athens wanted to triumph. This meant that you could trust Sparta in a way not possible with Athens.

In my next next post in this series I will look at the conflict between the two and of the role of Delos in that conflict.